Given the track record of Hoop Dreams filmmakers Steve James and Peter Gilbert, I should have anticipated that there was much more to At the Death House Door than it first seems. The film's low key down to earth protagonist lulls you into thinking that you are venturing into intimate day to day terrain, but the slow moving train narrative gears up midway and veers into a treatise that compels viewers to examine core spiritual values and beliefs. It squarely demonstrates inequities in the U.S. judicial system—how politics and racism can lead to wrongful and unethical decisions.

Humble chaplain Carroll Pickett dutifully ministered to death-row inmates in Huntsville, Texas for some 15 years with the belief that "no one should die alone" and kept audio tape records of the nearly hundred people he saw get executed. With a job description calling for him to offer the condemned sufficient solace that they would go to their deaths without a physical struggle, Pickett maintained a neutral public stance on capital punishment for years. After all, how could he gain the trust of a death row inmate during his final 24 hours if he thought this preacher believed in the righteousness of capital punishment, and how could he keep his job with the Texas prison system if they thought he didn't believe in their philosophy of justice?

For years Pickett believed that capital punishment was ethical, but that was coming from a man who accepted this Texas tradition without thinking, just as he had automatically withheld crying because his father drummed that into him. But that was before he encountered Carlos De Luna.

Convicted of stabbing a gas-station clerk to death in 1983 despite the lack of physical evidence—no murder weapon, no fingerprints on the scene, and no blood on his clothing—De Luna essentially took the fall for another Hispanic acquaintance who bore a slight physical resemblance to him. The only evidence offered was flimsy and circumstantial, resting on his criminal record for petty thefts and the fact that he was across the street from the murder at the time (and misidentified as the murderer by a witness). De Luna knew who the murderer was, but no one championed his innocence at the time—not even his sister, Rose Rhoton, who doubted her brother and accepted the lazy legal advice his defense lawyers offered. After De Luna's execution, Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maury Possley dug into the evidence and wrote a feature series that establishes De Luna's innocence and casts a pall over Texas' notorious criminal justice system.

Lest you think At the Death House Door parallels Errol Morris' groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line, this film slides into more personal emotional and spiritual terrain. This goes beyond indictments on the criminal justice system and delves into personal growth and redemption. Pickett remains the core figure who reveals his evolution and transformation. Disciplining frequently with his belt, Pickett's father never showed love and believed strongly in the death penalty (as his own father had been murdered); thus, explaining the minister's own highly repressed emotional state. Yet, the old minister begins to reveal his feelings on film when describing his time with De Luna—how the young man asks if he can call Pickett "Daddy" and the painful details of the 11 minute lethal injection gone wrong process.

"It was obvious that this fellow was innocent," states Pickett, and he now realizes that De Luna would not be the only wrongfully convicted person placed on death row; he writes of this in his 2002 memoir Within These Walls. But that book marks a beginning place—an inspiration for the documentary that ends up uncovering emotional terrain that can't be adequately described with mere words. James and Gilbert poignantly bring to light the personal struggles of a dedicated man who has been facing life and death issues on the front lines in a most provocative film.